Sooner or later, every tech giant decides to get into the retail business. There’s Apple, of course, whose 500-plus stores rank among its greatest, most disruptive successes. But also Microsoft (twice). And Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Sony. And now, Meta. On Monday, the company formerly known as Facebook is opening its first Meta Store, a retail outlet open to the public. It’s located in Burlingame, California, on the campus of the company’s 17,000-employee Reality Lab
When Tom Shen and Kenny Leung quit their tech jobs—as senior consultant at IBM and business strategist at Facebook, respectively—to launch a direct-to-consumer company in 2019, they had no idea that just a few months later, they’d run a thriving luxury makeup-brush brand with waitlists of customer names numbering into the thousands. Today, the duo run Rephr, a crowdsourced, pay-what-you-want beauty tools and skincare company that they continue to scale and iterate by leverag
When you hear the word “nanomedicine,” it might call to mind scenarios like those in the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage.” The film portrays a medical team shrunken down to ride a microscopic robotic ship through a man’s body to clear a blood clot in his brain. Nanomedicine has not reached that level of sophistication yet. Although scientists can generate nanomaterials smaller then several nanometers – the “nano” indicating one-billionth of a
On Thursday, major internet service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et al.) dropped a lawsuit challenging a California law requiring broadband networks to treat traffic and content from all websites and services equally. The ISPs’ legal challenge had already lost three times in California Federal courts. Network neutrality proponents are calling the abandonment of the suit a huge win for digital rights and the open web. The ISP trade groups revealed their decision in a brief filed Wedn
2021 was a roller coaster of a year for Apple when it came to privacy. The company hit highs with new privacy features like Hide My Email and Private Relay. Unfortunately, it also took a beating on the privacy front in two instances. When it announced plans to detect images of child sexual abuse on iPhones, privacy experts called the technology “dangerous,” and one that could possibly be exploited by authoritarian governments. (Apple ultimately stopped talking about
The best way to install apps from outside Apple’s App Store was only made possible because Riley Testut wanted to play Pokémon on his iPhone. Testut was still in college when he started building an emulator for playing classic Game Boy games on an iPhone. But when Apple wouldn’t allow the app in its store, he started looking for workarounds. The result was AltStore, which allows iPhone and iPad users to install Testut’s own Delta emulator for old Nintendo games along wi
For years, people have wondered how Apple does it. How does the company innovate the way it does? How does it create such insanely great products that surprise and delight? Few people know the struggle that it’s faced to get there. Like the great Michelangelo, Apple might say, “If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” When I joined Apple in 2015 as an HR business partner, I marveled at the technical depth of its genius-leve
In 2010, Kevin Tancharoen shot a short fan film that reimagined the Mortal Kombat franchise for YouTube audiences, hoping to catch the eye of executives at Warner Bros. After a disappointing pair of big-budget cinematic adaptations of the franchise, here was a look that matched the dark feel of the popular video game. Fans loved Tancharoen’s vision, and the internet went wild. Studios, however, basically balked at the project. Sure, Tancharoen landed a minor web series, but tha
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Lilly Singh has had a chip on her shoulder. The YouTube star was one of the earlier successes on the platform, amassing a following of 14 million subscribers who would tune in for her take on social mores and Indo-Canadian culture. Singh parlayed her online success into book deals, world tours, acting roles, and her short-lived late-night talk sh
A trio of tech giants want you to phone in your next password. No, not by falling back to some easily-memorized password, but by using your smartphone to log you into another nearby device of yours, such as your laptop. Google has announced that it would support a passwordless sign-on system in the Android and Chrome operating systems. In addition, Apple and Microsoft said they will do the same in their operating systems and browsers. That will allow you to mix and match platforms&#